The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  Harry acquiesced, too limp to resist her brisk authority. Around him, in the cabin that had once seemed so quaintly glamorous, he saw the stars glued on the walls. In the tube of the telescope, he saw the stars glued on the walls. For him, the mystery was gone. And yet he and Zoë continued with the list of labels, the dusty legends, the dry and crumbling bones . . . a menagerie of skeletons.

  Only at night, for Zoë to slip effortlessly through the flatness of those walls, to rocket into a space he was powerless to imagine. From this he was excluded. Wretchedly, he sat on the corner of his bed, night after lonely night, and he watched her. His effacement was almost complete.

  His bed had been requisitioned. The boat was a spaceship from which he could see nothing. The telescope was blinkered, spat­tered with bird shit. Lizzie’s bones were in Zoë’s custody. He’d thought the stars were his, like coins in his collection, but now they were tarnished beyond polishing. He’d thought the estuary was his, but he no longer dared identify the birds or the berries or the wild flowers, lest the child correct him; every cry from the dunes was a challenge he now shirked. He attempted the flute, exhuming it from its case, but it was a chill, unforgiving thing, and the child grimaced at the noise it made.

  Sometimes he went onto the sands, while the girl was at school. Head down, hunched under the hugeness of the sky, deaf to the distant sea, he stalked the mudflats. The dead horse was still there, broken into many pieces. He pushed aside the ribcage with his boots. Kneeling in the oil-black pool, he tugged at the vertebrae, twisting the gristle. But there was no brittlestar, although the child could find it in a dream, in her sleep, in the thundering spaces of heaven. For Harry, there were no shards left, no fragments of that meteorite. Unable to compromise, he rejected the starfishes that he found, hurling them away with a backhanded flick of the wrist or tossing them skywards for a gull to catch.

  The birds ignored him. They continued to feed, unruffled by his slow-moving, dull-brown presence, as he trod with his boots on the mud and kicked the clumps of weed. It was a vast place of sea and sand and sky. Harry Clewe was a speck on it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Where’s Tycho?’

  That was the first thing Zoë said when they stepped into the cabin that afternoon. It was January. Harry had struggled along the seashore track, cycling into a fierce, freezing wind, with the child on her seat behind him. The tide was coming in fast, the estuary was white with spray. They’d been unable to speak on the way home, against the roar of wind and water. He’d bent into the cold, with an icy rain on his forehead, and Zoë was huddled behind his back. It was a tremendous relief to be inside the cabin, where the fire was hot. Harry threw off his coat and knelt with his face to the stove. The Ozymandias ground on the sea wall, lifted higher and higher as the tide rose, and the groans of the timbers grew louder.

  ‘Where’s Tycho?’ she asked again. ‘He’s not here. And he wasn’t outside with us, on the ride from school. Where is he, Daddy?’

  He turned to look at her. Still in her coat, her hair speckled with raindrops, she peered about the cabin and she sniffed. She listened for the rattle of sharp claws. Moving past him to the telescope, she reached to its barrel and felt into the droppings; she bent to the floor to do the same thing. They were all dry. She went to the bed, where she sniffed the blankets.

  At first, Harry didn’t reply. He made busy with the fire. With the hatchet, which always leaned by the stove, he split some driftwood, the spars splintering under the blade. That morning, he’d evicted the jackdaw from the boat. He’d been daydreaming on the bed, when Tycho flapped in with a trophy from the beach: a sheep’s eye, gouged from a swollen carcase, which the bird had lifted to its customary perch on the telescope and started to peck, holding the slippery ball in one foot. This was too much. At the sound of the pecking, seeing Tycho with juices on its beak and breast, Harry had sprung from the bed and driven the bird outside. It hadn’t been seen since.

  ‘It’s going to get rough later on,’ he said. ‘There’ll be a really big tide tonight. A neap, that’s what they call it.’

  The girl snorted. Having established that the bird wasn’t there, she was standing quite still, pointing her eyes at her father.

  ‘No, Daddy,’ she said, with a little twist of a smile. ‘A neap is a smaller tide than usual, not a bigger one.’

  The boat shuddered under a shock of wind and was borne upwards. It squealed against the wall.

  ‘You put Tycho out?’ she asked. ‘This morning? And he hasn’t come back at all?’ She brushed past him, and the spray from her hair hissed on the stove. ‘I’d better go and find him then, hadn’t I?’

  She was up the steps and out, before he’d thought of anything to say. The cabin was dense with the smell of weed and the reek of Zoë’s disapproval.

  Uneasy, but determined not to follow her immediately, Harry continued to rebuild the fire; there would be hot water for the eve­ning and a hot stove for the cooking. He took up the soiled newspapers from the floor, burned them, replaced them with clean ones. The more objectionable remains of the horse he also put into the flames. With a damp cloth he wiped the length of the tele­scope, which was encrusted with droppings. All a bit late, he thought ruefully . . . long after Helen was gone and might never come back, long after she’d been driven away. He looked around the cabin.

  Books, a lot of books, of which he’d read and understood so few. Books about stars, too baffling, too difficult, demanding too much concentration and commitment; books of poems, which he seldom opened except to remind himself of the messages and prophecies he’d thought they contained. . . .

  His battered binoculars, through which, years before, he’d learned the stars in an African sky. . . .

  A red spotted neckerchief, stuffed under his pillow, faded and washed out, a piece of a previous life he’d had, a life and a love which had all but consumed him, which now he could hardly remember. . . .

  His flute case, locked, a coffin for his dead music. . . .

  The telescope, recently requisitioned by a crow. . . .

  The seashell constellations, as dead as hundreds of human finger­nails, stuck to the blue-black walls of the cabin. . . .

  So much baggage, surrounding him.

  And Lizzie was gone: his sister, his partner, his lover, the mother of his child. She’d been murdered. The scar on the beam was a reminder of the wounds on her throat.

  He shook himself from this daze and averted his face from the stupefying heat of the fire. Zoë was gone, too, into the storm.

  The late afternoon had grown dark. Now and then, as the boat lurched up and down, as it scraped its buffers against the wall, a flurry of spray rattled on the windows. The estuary was swollen and choppy. The rising waters foamed white. Harry was worried about Zoë, although she knew the shoreline as well as he did, or better, and was accustomed to being out there alone. He put on his waterproofs and clambered onto the deck.

  The tide was lapping at the top of the sea wall, so that, for the first time in all the years he’d lived on the Ozymandias, he could step downwards from the deck and onto the shore. He adjusted the mooring ropes, as the boat was riding so high. Glancing along the track, he saw the sea forcing onto it and rising still; soon it would be impassable, the water would be through the hedgerow and into the fields. He strode away from the boat.

  The cold took the breath from him. There was frost in the air, a pummelling wind. A hundred yards, two hundred yards along the shore, and then he turned and looked back at the hulk of the Ozymandias as it darkened into gloomy dusk. Horizontal, the smoke from the chimney raced inland. The light at the portholes surged and fell. Afternoon became evening and was suddenly night.

  No sign of Zoë. When he bellowed her name, the word van­ished in the noise. Not only the wind and the sea, but the rasping agitation of the hawthorn hedge took the word from him and tossed it away. She was out there, somewhere, and it needed an effort of imagination to remind himself of the darkness she always inhabited,
the irrelevance to her of daylight and twilight and pitch blackness; Harry was disoriented by the night, especially in this buffeting, but for Zoë it was another day of high winds across the estuary.

  He battled onwards, head down, tugging at the hood of his jacket, occasionally shouting, and when he came level with the gate from which the path crossed the fields and led to the churchyard, he leaned on it with his back to the sea in order to regain his breath. The wind pinned him against the gate until he swung clumsily over it, his waterproofs creaking, and he was driven to grassy, higher ground and the shelter of the cemetery wall. He ducked behind it and sat down. There was total darkness, a marvellous lull, while the gale bellied about him and left him quite untouched. The sycamores groaned, thrashing their leafless branches. But, with his shoulders on the bulging boulders, Harry had found a still place at the centre of a tumultuous world.

  It was a roaring world in which voices were lost. He crouched and listened. There were cries, gulls perhaps, or curlew. He pulled down his hood and strained to hear . . . yes, a cry, clear and high above the broil of the wind in the branches. But not a bird. He could hear a child’s voice and the single word it was shouting. ‘Ty . . . cho . . . !’ Each syllable took a full second. ‘Ty . . . cho . . . !’

  Harry lurched to his feet and stumbled on, bent double to keep his head below the top of the wall, until he reached the corner of the churchyard. There he met a blast of wind, a faceful of salt spray. It carried the cry more clearly to him. As he squinted into the howling darkness, he caught a movement in the field beyond, something white and shifting. A gull, grounded by the force of the storm? A sheet of blowing newspaper? Its purposeful progress told him it was Zoë, the glimmer of her hair: it was Zoë, bareheaded, resolute, a field away from him, working back in the direction of the Ozymandias’s mooring.

  Wanting to overtake her, he ran towards the shore, where he thought it would be quicker to use the gravel track than to nego­tiate the fields, with all their ditches and fences. However, when he reached the gate, he saw why the girl had opted for the inland route. The sea had covered the track. The tide had broken through the hedges, through the tumbledown stone wall, and still the water drove in. There was no alternative but to follow Zoë. At least he’d seen her, had heard her, could assume that she was safe.

  And so Harry discovered how it might feel to be blinded, for his senses were flummoxed. . . .

  He tumbled into drains, chest-deep in ice water. He blundered on barbed-wire fences. The ground collapsed beneath him, and he slithered in reedbeds and dew ponds. He was lashed with spray; the sting of salt was on his lips and in his eyes. There was blood on his hands. And always that roar, the sea or sky or both together, a torrent of dinning, deafening noise. . . . He was drowning in darkness. It took the ground from under his feet, snatched the breath from his mouth. Sometimes he glimpsed the child’s hair, the only bright thing in the world, a beacon to guide him home. He followed it. He thought he cried out, but he couldn’t hear his own voice; he thought he heard the child, but it must have been the wind. Sheep fled before him, cattle stumbled close, and these creatures were like boulders that shifted around him. There was no horizon from which to take a bearing, no silence against which the intensity of sound could be measured. His own footsteps, the beat of the blood in his head, the rhythm of his breathing . . . all of these were out of time. Somehow, by pursuing the bobbing body of the child, he reached that corner of the field which was nearest to the mooring of the Ozymandias.

  Here the child was lost. It was the first time Harry had seen her like this, when the world she’d learned and remembered was so altered that she no longer recognised it. Things had changed since she’d left the boat. The tide was over the track. Where there should have been sea wall and the rough gravel that bordered it, now there was a boiling race of water. It surged through the hedgerow. With each sucking withdrawal it abandoned mattresses of debris; with each roaring charge it brought more of this foaming flotsam. The Ozymandias rose high, all but lifted on top of the wall; only the tight­ness of the mooring ropes prevented the boat from being dropped and broken. He came up behind the girl. Together they stood in the corner of the field. Side by side they faced the flying spray.

  He pulled her to him, holding her cold, wet body. She was shivering violently. Her teeth were chattering.

  ‘Come on, Zoë!’ he shouted, putting his mouth to her ear to make her hear above the noise of wind and water. ‘Daddy’ll get you home safely! It’s not as deep as it sounds! Come on!’

  He picked her up. She was as light and as limp as a lamb. His bones seemed to flood with exhilaration: the child’s helplessness and disorientation fuelled him with strength. Having followed her this far, in mud and darkness, now he would carry her to safety. He timed the rushes and retreats of the waves. Waist-deep, he strode through the skeleton of the hawthorn with Zoë in his arms. He steadied himself against the force of the undertow, reassured by the track underfoot, and waded onwards until they were beside the hull. The boat bucked in front of him. It strained at the ropes with a creak and a groan, so that he staggered from it in case the child should be struck. He touched the edge of the sea wall with his foot, and he knew they were lost if he stepped too far, where they would surely be smashed and drowned. There was no way of boarding. The sea tore against his legs. It welled to his chest and the Ozymandias reared above him, a huge black mass that was going to topple and crush them; then it rolled away, controlled by the restraining ropes. So this went on for what seemed like hours, man and child cowering under the hull of the boat. Zoë lay against his chest as though she were dead.

  At last the wind began to drop. The cloud cover frayed, split enough for a little light to leak through, and then tore open, re­veal­ing a bright moon.

  ‘Right, Zoë!’ Harry shouted. ‘Now we can do it!’

  He lifted her easily and laid her on the deck of the boat. The storm was dying. The tide was falling, having peaked in the flooded fields. Making sure that the hull was clear of the wall, Harry loosened the ropes so that the Ozymandias could drop to the mud as the sea level dropped; then, moving quickly, he clambered aboard and carried the child below. She was a dead weight.

  Nothing was amiss in the cabin; only a few fronds of weed had fallen from the ceiling and a few books had tumbled from the shelves. Putting Zoë on the bed, Harry knelt swiftly to feed the stove and left its door wide open to warm the room. He tore off all his clothes, flung them down and rubbed himself very hard with a towel. Then he turned his attention to the girl.

  ‘Zoë?’ he cried. ‘Little Zoë? Are you there?’

  He bent to her. Her face was as cold as marble. Her lips were blue. Her hair was plastered about her head like a silver skullcap. When he began to undress her, she moaned and moved and her hands pushed abstractedly at his, to try and prevent him. He per­sisted, relieved to see her stirring, and soon he’d removed her shoes and socks, her trousers and pants, and was beginning to pull at her jacket. At this, she wriggled, tossing her head and murmuring, ‘No! No, you can’t! He’s not . . . !’ but the words were too faint for him, no more than a whisper against the crackle and spit of the fire. She wrestled from him, her arms locked across her chest. She continued to mutter and chatter.

  Feeling the icy cold in her limbs, Harry tugged at her. ‘Come on, Zoë! Out of these clothes! Look, I’ve taken all mine off! Let’s get yours off too and get you warm in bed! Come on, Zoë!’

  The child, whose eyes had been tightly shut until then, sud­denly blinked up at her father. She held that piercing, pale stare throughout the ensuing struggle, grinding her teeth loudly to­gether. He avoided it, turning his face from hers, as he gripped both of her tiny wrists in one of his hands and tore open the buttons of her jacket with the other. She screamed through locked jaws. She flailed her naked legs.

  ‘Livening up, are you, young madam?’ he shouted, very angry but encouraged by the heat he could feel in her. ‘Well, keep on kicking and we’ll soon have you warm again! T
hese clothes are coming off whether you like it or not!’

  She writhed hysterically, but he held her down easily with one hand.

  ‘All right, you little bitch!’ he bellowed at her. ‘If you want a fight you can bloody have one!’ He heaved himself onto the bed and sat astride her, bearing down on her thighs with the weight of his body. She was trapped. ‘Got you, you witch!’ He was panting heavily, unable to control his breath. ‘Now. . . .’

  A prisoner, she silenced her scream and lay still, her chest pound­ing, her eyes fixed on his. They remained like this for a minute, the naked man straddling the half-naked child. The boat moved gently on the moving swell. The cabin of the Ozymandias was a warm, swaying place. The shadows and the flames were dancing while the man and the child were motionless.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, lowering his face to hers. ‘Have we fin­ished our little tantrum?’

  Still he held her two hands in one of his, pressing them to the pillow, pinioning them above her head. With his free hand he started to undo her jacket. ‘You’re absolutely soaking, Zoë, my love. Don’t you think it’s a good idea to take these things off?’

  She maintained her unblinking stare. She lay limply beneath him as he tugged at her clothes. A tiny smile formed on her mouth, and her tongue appeared, like the tongue of a lizard. She licked her lips until they shone. She moved her hips very gently, very softly, arching her body off the bed so that her belly was pressed into his. Her smooth, wet skin slithered on him. Aware of his nakedness on her, Harry felt his mouth go dry . . . until, a moment later, seeing with horror and amazement that he was aroused, he sprang away from her and stood quivering by the stove.